Chapter 24 - Quality Management

Chapter 24 - Quality Management Spring 2014

Chapter 24 - Quality Management Lecture 1 Chapter 24 Quality management

Topics covered • Software quality • Software standards • Reviews and inspections • Software measurement and metrics Chapter 24 Quality management

Software quality management • Concerned with ensuring that the required level of quality is achieved in a software product. • Three principal concerns: • At the organizational level, quality management is concerned with establishing a framework of organizational processes and standards that will lead to high-quality software. • At the project level, quality management involves the application of specific quality processes and checking that these planned processes have been followed. • At the project level, quality management is also concerned with establishing a quality plan for a project. The quality plan should set out the quality goals for the project and define what processes and standards are to be used. Chapter 24 Quality management

Quality management activities • Quality management provides an independent check on the software development process. • The quality management process checks the project deliverables to ensure that they are consistent with organizational standards and goals • The quality team should be independent from the development team so that they can take an objective view of the software. This allows them to report on software quality without being influenced by software development issues. Chapter 24 Quality management

Quality management and software development Chapter 24 Quality management

Quality planning • A quality plan sets out the desired product qualities and how these are assessed and defines the most significant quality attributes. • The quality plan should define the quality assessment process. • It should set out which organisational standards should be applied and, where necessary, define new standards to be used. Chapter 24 Quality management

Quality plans • Quality plan structure • Product introduction; • Product plans; • Process descriptions; • Quality goals; • Risks and risk management. • Quality plans should be short, succinct documents • If they are too long, no one will read them. Chapter 24 Quality management

Scope of quality management • Quality management is particularly important for large, complex systems. The quality documentation is a record of progress and supports continuity of development as the development team changes. • For smaller systems, quality management needs less documentation and should focus on establishing a quality culture. Chapter 24 Quality management

Software quality • Quality, simplistically, means that a product should meet its specification. • This is problematical for software systems • There is a tension between customer quality requirements (efficiency, reliability, etc.) and developer quality requirements (maintainability, reusability, etc.); • Some quality requirements are difficult to specify in an unambiguous way; • Software specifications are usually incomplete and often inconsistent. • The focus may be ‘fitness for purpose’ rather than specification conformance. Chapter 24 Quality management

Software fitness for purpose • Have programming and documentation standards been followed in the development process? • Has the software been properly tested? • Is the software sufficiently dependable to be put into use? • Is the performance of the software acceptable for normal use? • Is the software usable? • Is the software well-structured and understandable? Chapter 24 Quality management

Software quality attributes Chapter 24 Quality management

Quality conflicts • It is not possible for any system to be optimized for all of these attributes – for example, improving robustness may lead to loss of performance. • The quality plan should therefore define the most important quality attributes for the software that is being developed. • The plan should also include a definition of the quality assessment process, an agreed way of assessing whether some quality, such as maintainability or robustness, is present in the product. Chapter 24 Quality management

Process and product quality • The quality of a developed product is influenced by the quality of the production process. • This is important in software development as some product quality attributes are hard to assess. • However, there is a very complex and poorly understood relationship between software processes and product quality. • The application of individual skills and experience is particularly important in software development; • External factors such as the novelty of an application or the need for an accelerated development schedule may impair product quality. Chapter 24 Quality management

Process-based quality Chapter 24 Quality management

Software standards • Standards define the required attributes of a product or process. They play an important role in quality management. • Standards may be international, national, organizational or project standards. • Product standards define characteristics that all software components should exhibit e.g. a common programming style. • Process standards define how the software process should be enacted. Chapter 24 Quality management

Importance of standards • Encapsulation of best practice- avoids repetition of past mistakes. • They are a framework for defining what quality means in a particular setting i.e. that organization’s view of quality. • They provide continuity - new staff can understand the organisation by understanding the standards that are used. Chapter 24 Quality management

Product and process standards Chapter 24 Quality management

Problems with standards • They may not be seen as relevant and up-to-date by software engineers. • They often involve too much bureaucratic form filling. • If they are unsupported by software tools, tedious form filling work is often involved to maintain the documentation associated with the standards. Chapter 24 Quality management

Standards development • Involve practitioners in development. Engineers should understand the rationale underlying a standard. • Review standards and their usage regularly. Standards can quickly become outdated and this reduces their credibility amongst practitioners. • Detailed standards should have specialized tool support. Excessive clerical work is the most significant complaint against standards. • Web-based forms are not good enough. Chapter 24 Quality management

ISO 9001 standards framework • An international set of standards that can be used as a basis for developing quality management systems. • ISO 9001, the most general of these standards, applies to organizations that design, develop and maintain products, including software. • The ISO 9001 standard is a framework for developing software standards. • It sets out general quality principles, describes quality processes in general and lays out the organizational standards and procedures that should be defined. These should be documented in an organizational quality manual. Chapter 24 Quality management

ISO 9001 core processes Chapter 24 Quality management

ISO 9001 and quality management Chapter 24 Quality management

ISO 9001 certification • Quality standards and procedures should be documented in an organisational quality manual. • An external body may certify that an organisation’s quality manual conforms to ISO 9000 standards. • Some customers require suppliers to be ISO 9000 certified although the need for flexibility here is increasingly recognised. Chapter 24 Quality management

Key points • Software quality management is concerned with ensuring that software has a low number of defects and that it reaches the required standards of maintainability, reliability, portability and so on. • SQM includes defining standards for processes and products and establishing processes to check that these standards have been followed. • Software standards are important for quality assurance as they represent an identification of ‘best practice’. • Quality management procedures may be documented in an organizational quality manual, based on the generic model for a quality manual suggested in the ISO 9001 standard. Chapter 24 Quality management

Reviews and inspections • A group examines part or all of a process or system and its documentation to find potential problems. • Software or documents may be 'signed off' at a review which signifies that progress to the next development stage has been approved by management. • There are different types of review with different objectives • Inspections for defect removal (product); • Reviews for progress assessment (product and process); • Quality reviews (product and standards). Chapter 24 Quality management

Quality reviews • A group of people carefully examine part or all of a software system and its associated documentation. • Code, designs, specifications, test plans, standards, etc. can all be reviewed. • Software or documents may be 'signed off' at a review which signifies that progress to the next development stage has been approved by management. Chapter 24 Quality management

The software review process Chapter 24 Quality management

Reviews and agile methods • The review process in agile software development is usually informal. • In Scrum, for example, there is a review meeting after each iteration of the software has been completed (a sprint review), where quality issues and problems may be discussed. • In extreme programming, pair programming ensures that code is constantly being examined and reviewed by another team member. • XP relies on individuals taking the initiative to improve and refactor code. Agile approaches are not usually standards-driven, so issues of standards compliance are not usually considered. Chapter 24 Quality management

These are peer reviews where engineers examine the source of a system with the aim of discovering anomalies and defects. Inspections do not require execution of a system so may be used before implementation. They may be applied to any representation of the system (requirements, design,configuration data, test data, etc.). They have been shown to be an effective technique for discovering program errors. Program inspections Chapter 24 Quality management

Checklist of common errors should be used to drive the inspection. Error checklists are programming language dependent and reflect the characteristic errors that are likely to arise in the language. In general, the 'weaker' the type checking, the larger the checklist. Examples: Initialisation, Constant naming, loop termination, array bounds, etc. Inspection checklists Chapter 24 Quality management

An inspection checklist (a) Chapter 24 Quality management

An inspection checklist (b) Chapter 24 Quality management

Agile processes rarely use formal inspection or peer review processes. Rather, theyrely on team members cooperating to check each other’s code, and informal guidelines, such as ‘check before check-in’, which suggest that programmers should check their own code. Extreme programming practitioners argue that pair programming is an effective substitute for inspection as this is, in effect, a continual inspection process. Two people look at every line of code and check it before it is accepted. Agile methods and inspections Chapter 24 Quality management

Software measurement and metrics • Software measurement is concerned with deriving a numeric value for an attribute of a software product or process. • This allows for objective comparisons between techniques and processes. • Although some companies have introduced measurement programmes, most organisations still don’t make systematic use of software measurement. • There are few established standards in this area. Chapter 24 Quality management

Software metric • Any type of measurement which relates to a software system, process or related documentation • Lines of code in a program, the Fog index, number of person-days required to develop a component. • Allow the software and the software process to be quantified. • May be used to predict product attributes or to control the software process. • Product metrics can be used for general predictions or to identify anomalous components. Chapter 24 Quality management

Predictor and control measurements Chapter 24 Quality management

Use of measurements • To assign a value to system quality attributes • By measuring the characteristics of system components, such as their cyclomatic complexity, and then aggregating these measurements, you can assess system quality attributes, such as maintainability. • To identify the system components whose quality is sub-standard • Measurements can identify individual components with characteristics that deviate from the norm. For example, you can measure components to discover those with the highest complexity. These are most likely to contain bugs because the complexity makes them harder to understand. Chapter 24 Quality management

Metrics assumptions • A software property can be measured. • The relationship exists between what we can measure and what we want to know. We can only measure internal attributes but are often more interested in external software attributes. • This relationship has been formalised and validated. • It may be difficult to relate what can be measured to desirable external quality attributes. Chapter 24 Quality management

Relationships between internal and external software Chapter 24 Quality management

Problems with measurement in industry • It is impossible to quantify the return on investment of introducing an organizational metrics program. • There are no standards for software metrics or standardized processes for measurement and analysis. • In many companies, software processes are not standardized and are poorly defined and controlled. • Most work on software measurement has focused on code-based metrics and plan-driven development processes. However, more and more software is now developed by configuring Enterprising Resource Planning (ERP) systems or COTS. • Introducing measurement adds additional overhead to processes. Chapter 24 Quality management

Product metrics • A quality metric should be a predictor of product quality. • Classes of product metric • Dynamic metrics which are collected by measurements made of a program in execution; • Static metrics which are collected by measurements made of the system representations; • Dynamic metrics help assess efficiency and reliability • Static metrics help assess complexity, understandability and maintainability. Chapter 24 Quality management

Dynamic and static metrics • Dynamic metrics are closely related to software quality attributes • It is relatively easy to measure the response time of a system (performance attribute) or the number of failures (reliability attribute). • Static metrics have an indirect relationship with quality attributes • You need to try and derive a relationship between these metrics and properties such as complexity, understandability and maintainability. Chapter 24 Quality management

Static software product metrics Chapter 24 Quality management

The CK object-oriented metrics suite Chapter 24 Quality management

Software component analysis • System component can be analyzed separately using a range of metrics. • The values of these metrics may then be compared for different components and, perhaps, with historical measurement data collected on previous projects. • Anomalous measurements, which deviate significantly from the norm, may imply that there are problems with the quality of these components. Chapter 24 Quality management

Chapter 24 - Quality Management